Increasingly documents are being natively created and subsequently stored in an electronic environment. Reliance on paper-based media is on the decline. In the past, important documents (e.g., legal, work related documents, etc.) were almost exclusively produced on paper and subsequently stored in filing cabinets, court libraries, safety deposit boxes, etc. This is no longer exclusively the case as more and more electronic documents are being admitted into court proceedings as evidence and being relied upon by individuals and enterprises as master versions of their contracts, wills, deeds, papers of incorporation, titles, and other important documents.
One problem associated with relying on electronic versions of documents is that often documents may be stored in electronic formats that are readily and easily modified. This is particularly relevant in workflow situations where a document may have counter signatures for approval that is applied to it. Documents may be modifiable in or produced with electronic editors, which permit the contents of the documents to be changed. Furthermore, even some bitmap versions of documents are modifiable within an image editor even though bitmap formats are not generally thought of as capable of being modified. Thus, if a finalized document is capable of being subsequently modified, then there may always exist a question, with any given version of that document, as to whether it is the true finalized version or as to whether it has been subsequently tampered with.
Another issue with relying on electronic versions of documents is that often the native format of the data that comprises the electronic document is associated with inherent variability. That is, many documents are no longer static in nature, such that some aspects of a document are dynamically resolved based on the environment in which they are rendered and/or based on execution of some program logic that may be embedded within the document and executed with the document when it is rendered to a target environment.
So, the same document rendered on different displays, devices, or environments may actually produce different versions of content and/or different visual appearances. For documents signatures, such a situation can be particularly problematic because parties associated with the documents may each assert that they have the proper version or master version; but, each version is in fact different from the other versions either in terms of visual appearance and/or in terms of actual content.
Therefore, although reliance on paper-based media is waning there is still some reluctance and some remaining technical issues associated with completely removing paper dependency from commercial and legal processes.